INVENTING A FRENCH TYRANT:

CRISIS, PROPAGANDA, AND THE ORIGINS OF FÉNELON’S IDEAL KING

Kirsten L. Cooper

A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of History.

Chapel Hill 2013

Approved by:

Jay M. Smith

Chad Bryant

Lloyd S. Kramer

brought to you by COREView metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk

provided by Carolina Digital Repository

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© 2013 Kirsten L. Cooper

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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ABSTRACT Kirsten L. Cooper: Inventing a French Tyrant: Crisis, Propaganda, and the Origins of Fénelon’s

Ideal King (Under the direction of Jay M. Smith and Chad Bryant)

In the final decades of the seventeenth century, many voices across Europe vehemently

criticized Louis XIV, the most well-known coming from the pen of François Fénelon from

within Versailles itself. There were, however, many other critics of varied backgrounds who

participated in this common discourse of opposition. From the 1660s to the 1690s the authors of

these pamphlets developed a stock of critiques of Louis XIV that eventually coalesced into a

negative depiction of his entire style of government. His manner of ruling was rejected as

monstrous and tyrannical. Fénelon's ideal king, a benevolent patriarch that he presents as an

alternative to Louis XIV, was constructed in opposition to the image of Louis XIV developed

and disseminated by these international authors. In this paper I show how all of these authors

engaged in a process of borrowing, recopying, and repackaging to create a common critical

discourse that had wide distribution, an extensive, transnational audience, and lasting impact for

the development of changing ideals of sovereignty.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to take a moment to thank everybody who helped me and supported me

while writing and researching this thesis. First and foremost I must acknowledge the immense

support, guidance, advice, and feedback given to me by my advisors and committee members

Jay M. Smith, Chad Bryant, and Lloyd S. Kramer. Thank you also to my friends and family who

supported me and kept me grounded throughout this process. Thank you to my colleagues in

History 901 and cohort members for your support, commiseration, and innumerable comments,

critiques, and suggestions. Thank you also to John Chasteen for guiding all of us through the

writing process. Thank you to Brian Drohan and Jeffrey Harris for acting as my sounding boards

and personal reference librarians. Finally, a special thank you to my mother, whose editing skills

I can always count on no matter how long the paper, how late the request, or how obscure the

topic.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter

I. International Law, Slavery, and Universal Monarchy ............................................ 7 II. The Soul of Machiavelli .......................................................................................... 14 III. The French Tyrant ................................................................................................... 23

IV. Fénelon’s Benevolent Patriarch .............................................................................. 38

CONCLUSION: Rethinking Intellectual Creation ..................................................................... 47

BIBLIOGRAPHY ...................................................................................................................... 51

1

INTRODUCTION

In 1684, shortly after the original version was published in German, an English printer

ran a translation of the latest work by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, famed mathematician and

philosopher. This publication was not a philosophical treatise. It did not explain the intricacies of

a new discovery in mathematics or science. It was, instead, a satirical critique of Louis XIV

written in response to aggressive French policies towards the Holy Roman Empire.1 Leibniz

lamented that if the French king were allowed to succeed in his ambitions for European

domination, the “absolute” power of Louis XIV would force Germany into miserable slavery

under the “French yoke.” Leibniz, tongue firmly in cheek, offered only this consolation: “You

will be happy my friends in Heaven, when the French shall have made you miserable in this

world; for you will go thither so much the more willingly.”2 Leibniz spent time in France and

had affinities for French culture, but he disapproved of Louis XIV’s “absolute” power. This

unchecked authority led to Louis XIV’s expansionist policies and his desire to place all of

Europe under the “French yoke”. Leibniz was just one example of a large group of writers,

French and not, who took up the pen to attack Louis XIV during his reign.3 Leibniz’s scathing,

1 P. J. W. van Malssen, Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets répandus en Hollande, (Amsterdam: H.J. Paris, 1936), 43, 158–159; Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 148.

2 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Mars Christianissimus Autore Germano Gallo-Græco: Or, an Apology for the Most Christian King’s Taking up Arms Against the Christians (London: Printed for R. Bentley, and S.Magnes, in Rassel-Street in Covent Garden, 1684), 46.

3 There has been no serious study of this body of literature as a whole since the beginning of the twentieth century. See Karl Ringhoffer, Die Flugschriften-Literatur Zu Beginn Des Spanischen Erbfolgekriegs (Berlin, 1881); Paul Schmidt, Die deutsche Publizistik in den Jahren 1667-1671 (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1907); Malssen, Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets; Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Chapter X, “The Reverse of the Medal”, 135–149; Joseph

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satirical pamphlet incorporated tropes that had been developed by other critics in an international

conversation that spanned Louis XIV’s reign.

The individuals who wrote against Louis XIV had extremely varied backgrounds and yet

participated in a common discourse that opposed the Sun King. Most pamphlets were published

anonymously, and for many the authors will remain unknown. But when the identities of these

authors can be discerned, it is clear that these individuals were not simply hired political pens. In

fact, like Leibniz, most of the individual authors were better known for their contributions in the

realm of natural philosophy, alchemy, literature, or mathematics. François-Paul de Lisola, one of

the earliest and most famous international critics of Louis XIV, was employed as a diplomat for

the Habsburg emperor Leopold I, and yet even Lisola published his works independently,

sometimes without notifying the court in Vienna.4 Without instruction or state organization a

large group of individuals from across Europe joined together in the creation of a common

discourse of denigration. This discourse was inspired by the visceral, common experience of

crisis. Louis XIV’s reign was marked by warfare, persecution, and perceived oppression,

domestically and internationally. The individuals who authored critical propaganda constructed

their critiques in response to the passions and anxieties of facing these crises year after year.5

Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV: Absolute Monarchy and Public Opinion (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1976).

4 Lisola did not notify Vienna of his first pamphlet until after it was published. At first not very receptive to the idea, Leopold eventually approved of Lisola’s pamphlets, though there is no evidence that Lisola was ever paid by the Habsburg court for his writings. For more information see Markus Baumanns, Das publizistiche Werk des kaiserlichen Diplomaten Franz Paul Freiherr von Lisola (1613-1674): ein Beitrag zum Verhältnis von absolutistischem Staat, Öffentlichkeit und Mächtepolitik in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 312–322.

5 Although the term is anachronistic, I follow in the footsteps of scholars such as Klaits and Burke in referring to this literature as propaganda. I use the definition put forward by Jowett & O’Donnell that, “propaganda is the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.” See Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda & Persuasion, 5th ed. (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE, 2012), 7.

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The authors of these pamphlets developed a stock of critiques of Louis XIV that

eventually coalesced into a negative depiction of his entire style of government, which was

rejected as monstrous and tyrannical. In response to this rejection of Louis XIV’s style of ruling,

new interpretations of the duty and role of an ideal king emerged. François Fénelon forwarded

one such alternative in his allegorical tale, Telemachus (1699). Fénelon’s influence on later

philosophes such as Montesquieu and Rousseau has been well documented by scholars of the

early Enlightenment, but the influences on his own writing have been neglected.6 Although many

scholars treat Fénelon’s image of ideal kingship as an independent invention, based upon his

own experience with Louis XIV and his own genius, Fénelon actually owed a great debt to the

international authors of this propaganda and the image of Louis XIV that they created and

disseminated. Fénelon constructed his ideal king out of the debris of the image of Louis XIV, the

monstrous French tyrant.

Fénelon and the individual authors of these pamphlets engaged in a process of bricolage.

As articulated by Keith Baker, bricolage is the act of gathering material from the available

intellectual “stock” - discourses, images, ideas, constructions - that one is exposed to, and then

synthesizing and reassembling that material to fit the momentary needs of the writer.7 I employ

this concept on a very individual basis, in contrast to Baker’s focus on intersubjective

“discourses”, by viewing it as the process through which any individual synthesizes the 6Renato Galliani, Rousseau, Le Luxe et L’idéologie Nobiliaire: Étude Socio-Historique (Oxford: The Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, 1989); Melvin Richter, “Introduction,” in Montesquieu: Selected Political Writings, ed. Melvin Richter (Indianapolis: Hackett Pub. Co., 1990), See especially 18, 20; Patrick Riley, “Introduction,” in Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, ed. Patrick Riley (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xiii–xxxi.

7 This idea was first articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss and later expanded upon by Jacques Derrida. Keith Baker reworks this idea to apply it specifically to intellectual history. Baker, however, uses the term to refer more to the process by which discourses, in the Foucouldian sense, are developed. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (University of Chicago Press, 1966), 16–33; Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 285–287; Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution: Essays on French Political Culture in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 15–16.

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intellectual currents to which he or she is exposed. Fénelon and the pamphlet writers drew from

many currents, including political theory, religious discourses, and slanderous images articulated

in earlier pamphlets. In the process of accomplishing the particular task of writing a persuasive,

critical pamphlet against Louis XIV or in suggesting a viable alternative to the way he exercised

sovereignty, each author selectively chose ideas to create a construction that would have the

greatest likelihood of successfully persuading readers of the villainy and depravity of Louis XIV

and the need for a new style of kingship.

The process described as bricolage provides a much more compelling and intuitive

conceptualization of intellectual history than a simple focus on “great ideas” developed by “great

men.” In line with more recent scholarship, this paper understands that categories of thought,

such as philosophy, politics, religion, or science, are always fluid, as are an individual’s

engagement with these categories.8 This was even truer for the late seventeenth-century, in

which the modern concept of “specializations” had not yet emerged. Newton was fascinated by

alchemy when not busy inventing calculus, and Locke tackled the concept of miracles even as he

8 Traditionally, interpretations of intellectual developments in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have focused on philosophes. These “great men,” usually British or French, sometimes German, developed “great ideas,” that comprise what is known as “The Enlightenment.” Many valuable works have been written that focus on the writings of these intellectuals. For three classic works see, Daniel Mornet, Les Origines Intellectuelles de La Révolution Française, 1715-1787 (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1989); Paul Hazard, The Crisis of the European Mind, 1680-1715, trans. J. Lewis May (New York: New York Review Books, 2013); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, The Rise of Modern Paganism (Knopf, 1966). Several more recent authors have also employed this approach. See, Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Dan Edelstein, The Enlightenment: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).Other historians have expanded their investigation to include the social, political, and intellectual contexts in which the more famous philosophes were writing. These works have explored the Enlightenment as a phenomenon beyond a select group of male, intellectual elites, bringing politics, religion, and gender into their assessments. See, Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982); Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981); Dale Van Kley, The Jansenists and the Expulsion of the Jesuits from France, 1757-1765 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975); Lionel Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV: The Political and Social Origins of the French Enlightenment (Princeton University Press, 1965).

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developed a new interpretation of the social contract.9 Leibniz was involved in political debates

sparked by current events. Fénelon was inspired by the common discourse these political debates

created. This discourse constituted an intensely international conversation. Leibniz’s pamphlet,

although originally in German and chiefly concerned with the Empire, was translated into

English and printed in London within a year of its original publication. It was also just as quickly

translated into French. Fénelon’s Telemachus was also widely read internationally, with multiple

translations and editions throughout the eighteenth century. The writings that comprised this

common critical discourse had wide distribution and an extensive, transnational audience. They

were translated into every major western European language and many were reprinted in

multiple editions. Fénelon’s ideal king was not simply a product of domestic politics or

established political theory, but of a transnational discussion in which authors borrowed from all

of these genres when they responded to the experience of crisis.

I begin this investigation by tracing the development of critiques of Louis XIV within

international propaganda, from a stock of criticisms to a cohesive negative depiction of Louis

XIV’s style of government. The Sun King was initially portrayed as a monarch who had made

the mistake of contravening international law, but he came to be seen as a Machiavellian prince

who defied morality, religion, justice and humanity, and then as a monstrous tyrant who was

villainous and depraved by nature and who’s despotic government required reform as well as

opposition. The reconceptualization of critiques during this period can be traced specifically

through the changing meanings of “universal monarchy,” “liberty,” and “slavery.” François-Paul

9 Gale E Christianson, Isaac Newton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); R. S. Woolhouse, Locke: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Locke, John Locke: Writings on Religion, ed. Victor Nuovo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). Leibniz, too, had extremely varied intellectual pursuits and influences besides those already stated. See Maria Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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de Lisola, one of the most famous individuals to write against Louis XIV, popularized the

critique of “universal monarchy” and decried France as a power that threatened the liberty of

European states. His use of these terms was firmly anchored in late seventeenth-century ideas of

international law. By the 1680s, these terms came to denote the absolute power of Louis XIV, by

which he had enslaved all of France and with which he threatened to oppress the liberty of all

European people. The new employment of these terms exemplified a shift from criticizing Louis

XIV in legal terms to denigrating him and his style of government on a moral plane. Through a

more detailed look at several sources published in 1689, one can see that the negative depiction

of Louis XIV as a ruthless, ambitious, belligerent king who held France in slavery and tried to

extend his absolute power into a universal monarchy was articulated as a cohesive image that

demanded a moral revulsion against Louis XIV’s style of government.

I then turn from international propaganda to François Fénelon’s Telemachus (1699) to

uncover the connections between the international discussion of the pamphlet writers and the

familiar concept of an ideal king articulated by Fénelon. For Fénelon, Louis XIV was the

example of everything a monarch should not be. International authors of this propaganda viewed

his entire style of government as ruinous. Fénelon, however, offered an alternative. In response

to the international conversation surrounding Louis XIV, Fénelon developed his ideal king in

Telemachus: a benevolent, patriarchal monarch who exerts all of his power and authority for the

good of his subjects, respects law, religion, and morality, and subordinates his own desires to the

good of the state. By tracing the origins of Fénelon’s ideal king to the international discourse that

disparaged Louis XIV, one discovers a more coherent picture of the stock of material available to

this early philosophe, which influenced his ideas and how he articulated them.

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CHAPTER I

International Law, Slavery, and Universal Monarchy

The negative image of Louis XIV that influenced Fénelon in the 1690s was developed

over time, piece by piece, in response to the continued crises of Louis XIV’s reign: war,

conquest, persecution, and bloodshed. Lisola’s writings reveal that at the beginning of Louis

XIV’s individual reign, he was depicted in a much less negative manner. In Lisola’s response to

Louis XIV’s invasion of the Spanish Netherlands (1667) the diplomat used a compilation of

familiar political concepts and international law. He adapted his intellectual raw materials to

better fit with his own experience of conquest and his goal to oppose Louis XIV. Lisola thus

created the basis for a new critical discourse that would prove very influential.

Lisola was a Habsburg diplomat and native of Franche-Comté, one of the territories

seized by Louis XIV in 1667 during the War of Devolution. Lisola was one of the earliest and

most influential international authors to criticize the expansionist policies of Louis XIV.10 In his

treatises, Lisola applied the notion of universal monarchy to the French for the first time.

Universal monarchy was a concept traditionally associated with the Habsburgs and was used by

Lisola as a familiar evocation of ambition. Lisola also used this concept in an innovative way,

10 For discussions of Lisola’s life and writings see Baumanns, Das publizistiche Werk; Émile Longin, François de Lisola, sa vie, ses écrits, son testament, 1613-1674 (Dole: Chaligne, 1900); Alfred Francis Pribram, Franz Paul Freiherr von Lisola (1613-1674) und die Politik seiner Zeit: Mit dem Bildniss Lisolas (Leipzig: Veit & Comp., 1894); Malssen, Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets, 159; Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV, 22–23, 91–92; Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 148; The French Politician Found Out, Or, Considerations on the Late Pretensions That France Claims to England and Ireland and Her Designs and Plots in Order Thereunto, 1680; Leibniz, Mars Christianissimus, 3; Gatien Courtilz de Sandras, French Intrigues; Or, The History of Their Delusory Promises since the Pyrenæan Treaty (London: Printed by H. Hills Jun. for William Cademan, at the sign of the Popes-head, in the New-Exchange in the Strand, 1685).

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however. He combined universal monarchy with the idea of liberty, as possessed by each state,

in order to portray Louis XIV as a threat to Europe’s international system and the autonomy of

the states within it. Lisola’s deployment of these terms was based on an idea of international law

that had emerged out of the exhaustion of the age of religious wars. Lisola reworked and

reemployed these concepts to convince his audience that Louis XIV needed to be stopped.

In 1665, the king of Spain, Philip IV, died. His son, the four-year-old Charles II, was

physically handicapped, mentally weak, and was never expected to survive long. The future of

the Spanish Habsburg line was extremely precarious and Louis XIV was poised to strike. His

own wife was Philip IV’s daughter, Maria Teresa, who had been heir to the throne until the birth

of Charles II, but who had renounced her inheritance when she married Louis, future king of

France. According to Louis XIV and his supporters, this renunciation was contingent upon the

payment of Maria Teresa’s dowry, which was never fulfilled. After Philip IV’s death, Louis XIV

seized the moment and invaded the Spanish Netherlands, which he claimed as his wife’s rightful

inheritance, which had been denied to her unjustly. As French armies overran the territories that

comprise modern-day Belgium, they were met with little military resistance. Spain, whose power

had steadily declined since mid-century, could do little but watch from far-away Madrid as the

lucrative Low-Countries were seemingly lost to the military might of France. The military

response to Louis XIV’s assault in the War of Devolution was pitiful; the ideological response,

however, was emphatic. The first of the wars of Louis XIV may have been a military success,

but it was a diplomatic failure.11

When Louis XIV invaded the Spanish Netherlands, Lisola urged the Habsburg Emperor,

Leopold I, to intervene. When Lisola’s appeals went unanswered, he independently wrote a 11 John A. Lynn, The Wars of Louis XIV, 1667-1714 (New York: Longman, 1999), see chapter 5, “Wars of Gloire: The War of Devolution and the Dutch War.”

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treatise to counter French justifications for the attack and to present the rest of Europe with an

argument about the dangers that Louis XIV’s ambitions posed.12 In this influential treatise,

entitled The Buckler of State and Justice against the Design Manifestly Discovered of the

Universal Monarchy, under the Vain Pretext of the Queen of France, her Pretensions, Lisola

based his arguments upon two main ideas: the illegitimacy of Louis’s claims for his wife’s

inheritance and the illegitimacy of France’s attempt to incorporate Spanish territories. These

were both legalistic objections based on a lengthy treatment of relevant laws and practices

concerning first, laws of inheritance, and second, laws of international relations.

Lisola assessed the basis of Louis XIV’s claims - the validity of Maria Teresa’s right to

inherit – in order to invalidate them. Lisola concluded that under no circumstances was the claim

of Louis XIV on behalf of his wife valid. If the renunciation in the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659)

had really been contingent upon payment of her dowry, which was in itself doubtful, then Louis

XIV had been more than compensated for the value of the dowry by other means. Additionally,

if the renunciation was invalid, it was still questionable whether or not a woman had the right to

inherit, and if so, the daughters of Philip IV’s first wife would have precedence over Maria

Teresa, daughter of Philip IV’s second wife. When he disproved the claim that Maria Teresa had

been denied her rightful inheritance, Lisola undermined Louis XIV’s justifications for the

invasion.

Lisola’s invalidation of the justifications put forward by Louis XIV’s supporters placed

more emphasis on the second, and most influential, part of Lisola’s argument. After his

discussion of inheritance laws, Lisola switched gears to prove that Louis XIV violated

international law and custom when he invaded and attempted to incorporate the Spanish

12 Baumanns, Das publizistiche Werk, 312–322.

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Netherlands. Louis XIV’s conquest of the Spanish Netherlands violated the autonomy of these

territories. The idea that each state in Europe was autonomous, and therefore had the prerogative

to be ruled by its own laws and regulations, emerged as a key principle of international law in

response to the exhaustion of religious conflicts that had culminated in the Thirty Years War

(1614-1648).13 During and after the negotiations for the Peace of Westphalia, it was generally

agreed that states should not interfere in the laws and institutions of other states, whether

religious or political. If Louis XIV’s invasion were allowed to succeed, however, the Spanish

Netherlands would have been ruled by French laws and French institutions.

This would, in turn, have violated Spanish law. As Lisola explained, “one of the most

ancient constitutions of the monarchy of Spain… is that their kingdom is not alienable, that they

live always under their own peculiar kings, and that their crown can neither be annexed nor

incorporated with any other.” French conquest would plunge the Spanish Netherlands into

“slavery.” The Spanish Netherlands would become simply “a member and an inseparable

accessory of France… reduced to the same condition with Brittany and other provinces.” France

would enslave the Spanish Netherlands by violating its “freedom” or autonomy.14 Lisola used the

evocative concepts of “slavery” and “freedom” to highlight how serious this break of

international law by Louis XIV truly was.

As Lisola articulated the threat that France posed to the autonomy of the Spanish

Netherlands, he also argued that France posed the same threat of “slavery” to the rest of Europe.

13 Andreas Osiander, The States System of Europe, 1640-1990: Peacemaking and the Conditions of International Stability (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 77. Osiander calls this concept the “autonomy principle.” He uses the term “autonomy” instead of “sovereignty” as a more precise and less anachronistic way of capturing the idea in practice at the time. As “sovereignty” was still most frequently used to mean the power and authority of an individual ruler over a territory or state, I agree with Osiander and use “autonomy” here.

14 François-Paul de Lisola, The Buckler of State and Justice against the Design Manifestly Discovered of the Universal Monarchy, under the Vain Pretext of the Queen of France, Her Pretensions (London: Printed by James Flesher for Richard Royston, 1667), 91–2.

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Lisola accused Louis XIV of attempting to achieve a universal monarchy and saw the invasion in

1667 as the first step on this path. Universal monarchy had been used for a century and a half to

refer to the Habsburgs, specifically the Spanish branch.15 Although initially promoted as a

positive characterization of the Spanish Habsburg Empire, as the supporters and protectors of the

Catholic Church, Spain’s enemies quickly used it as a negative critique of ambition and

belligerence. When Lisola used this term to refer to Louis XIV’s invasion, he played off of this

long history. All of Europe needed to fear Louis XIV’s ambition, because France’s “immense

preparation of arms and intrigues hath something in it of greater extent then [sic] the bare

conquest of some provinces.”16 Although Louis XIV’s first attack was focused only on the

Spanish Netherlands, Lisola argued, “we cannot reasonably expect that the swiftness of the

Rhine shall be able to stop him” from marching his armies into German territories.17 The French

“design” was to conquer as much of Europe as “the fortune of war” would allow. Italy, Spain,

England, Holland, the Empire and Poland all had to fear the ambition of France.18 Lisola

15 Universal Monarchy as a concept had ideological roots in both the memory of imperial Rome and the universal Catholic Church. It was employed more concretely by Gattinara, grand chancellor of Charles V at the beginning of the sixteenth century as both a justification and ideology of Charles V’s unprecedentedly large empire. During the Thirty Years War the idea was taken up as the slogan “par excellence” of anti-Spanish interests. It was forwarded as the counterpoint to the idea of “German liberty,” and referred more to perceived attempts to achieve Habsburg hegemony in the Holy Roman Empire. France especially used this concept as justification for entering the conflict on the side of the Protestants. See Franz Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis: Ein Politischer Leitbegriff Der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France c.1500-c.1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Jean-Paul Duviols and Annie Molinié-Bertrand, eds., Charles Quint et La Monarchie Universelle (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, 2001); John M. Headley, The Emperor and His Chancellor: A Study of the Imperial Chancellery under Gattinara (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); John M. Headley, “Germany, the Empire and Monarchia in the Thought and Policy of Gattinara,” in Church, Empire and World: The Quest for Universal Order, 1520-1640, ed. John M. Headley (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1997), 15–33; Peer Schmidt, Spanische Universalmonarchie oder teutsche Libertet: das spanische Imperium in der Propaganda des Dreissigjährigen Krieges (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2001).

16 Lisola, The Buckler of State, 6.

17 Ibid., 8.

18 Ibid., 300, 46.

12

exploited the concept of universal monarchy as a familiar evocation of insatiable territorial

ambition to stress the need to oppose Louis XIV’s armies in the Spanish Netherlands.

In Lisola’s pamphlets, universal monarchy gained new relevance because he invoked the

autonomy principle and contemporary concepts of international law. The true danger of French

universal monarchy for Lisola stemmed from the threat it posed to the autonomy of individual

states within the European system. As with the Spanish Netherlands, French conquest of other

territories in Europe would mean the end of their autonomous existence and a violation of their

prerogatives. Once France had subjected the Spanish Netherlands to the “slavery” of French laws,

Louis XIV would turn his sights to the Empire and others, until all of Europe had lost the

“freedom” of an autonomous existence.19

“Lisola’s use of the concepts of ‘universal monarchy,’ ‘liberty,’ and ‘slavery’ were

anchored in his critique of Louis XIV as a violator of international law. The combination of these

ideas served two very useful functions: first, as an interpretive schema to explain Louis XIV’s

policies and second, as justification for taking action against France.20 Lisola used the threat

represented by the former to encourage other states in Europe to intervene in terms of the latter.

The only way to prevent the enslavement of Europe was to stop and contain Louis XIV before he

incorporated the autonomous states of Europe into the kingdom of France. Lisola popularized the

use of these concepts, especially of universal monarchy, which maintained its currency and was

repeated in pamphlets throughout Louis XIV’s reign. Later authors, however, manipulated and

modified these concepts to better respond to the continued experience of crisis.

19 Ibid., 275.

20 Bosbach, Monarchia Universalis, 116–117.

13

England, Sweden, and the Dutch Republic intervened to bring the War of Devolution to

an end. This triple alliance exerted enough pressure that Louis XIV agreed to negotiate. The

Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1668) gave France several important towns, but on the whole, Louis

XIV had to give up most of the territories he had conquered. Louis XIV placed much of the

blame for this outcome on the Dutch, who he believed had betrayed him. He quickly began to

dismantle the Triple Alliance to isolate the Dutch Republic.21 The strategy proved successful and

within four years Louis XIV exacted his revenge when he invaded the Dutch lands. In response

to Louis XIV’s persistent belligerence, cries of opposition increased. Amidst French

protestations and justifications for another round of warfare, territorial conquest, and bloodshed,

the international political writers saw nothing but ambition. Many authors recycled Lisola’s

accusation of universal monarchy and criticized Louis XIV in similar terms of international law.

As events of the Franco-Dutch War (1672-1678) unfolded, combined with news of French

domestic policies during the 1670s, pamphlet writers increasingly embellished and expanded

upon this picture.

21 Lynn, War of Louis XIV, 89; Jeremy Black, European International Relations, 1648-1815 (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 108–110.

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CHAPTER II

The Soul of Machiavelli

Lisola portrayed Louis XIV as a monarch who defied international law and whose

ambition would trample Europe if allowed to go unchecked. Ultimately, Lisola argued that Louis

XIV could be stopped if the powers of Europe banded together to oppose him. Louis XIV would

then, hopefully, learn the error of his ways. After the Peace of Aix-La-Chapelle however, the

international authors of this propaganda began to see Louis XIV as a king beyond fixing. They

developed a wider stock of characteristics used to denigrate Louis XIV in response to Louis

XIV’s invasion of German and Dutch lands during the Franco-Dutch war and his apparent

appropriation of all domestic power. Louis XIV became a monarch who regularly disregarded

international law and the autonomy of European states, and did so with an almost bloodthirsty

relish. In addition, Louis XIV manipulated domestic laws to arrogate all power for himself.

Finally, Louis XIV used religion as a tool; he embraced it to achieve his own ends and eschewed

it when it suited him. Neither law, nor morality, nor religion could contain the ambitions of this

monarch. This stock of critiques, developed during the 1670s, was suited only to a prince driven

by the “soul of Machiavelli.”22

In late June, 1672, the cold, salty waters of the North Sea inundated an area just east of

Amsterdam.23 As the frigid seawater rushed and flooded, destroying farmland and pasture, the

region of Holland was effectively turned into an island, cut off from the rest of the United

Provinces. This was not a failure of the complex Dutch levee system, developed over hundreds 22 Johann Joachim Becher, Machiavellus Gallicus: Das Ist: Verwandelung Und Versetzung Der Seele Des Machiavelli in Ludovicum XIV. Dem König von Frankreich, Vogestellet Durch Hundert Politische Frantzösische Axiomata, In Welchen Der Frantzosen Staats- Und Kriegs-Maximen Und Practicquen, Welcher Sie Sich Gebrauchen, Jedem Offentlich Zu Sehen Vorgestellet Werden (N.p., 1675).

23 Black, European International Relations, 91.

15

of years to wage sustained combat against Mother Nature. Rather, the Dutch, who had for so

long fought to keep water out, had now intentionally opened their dikes and flooded their lands

in an act of desperation. On the other side of the water line was an enemy that posed a much

more immediate threat: the armies of Louis XIV. Five years earlier, as the Dutch and the rest of

Europe had watched Louis XIV’s armies march into the Spanish Netherlands, Lisola had

endeavored to convince them that this was simply the first step on the path towards French

universal monarchy. Lisola had argued that the ambition of France would eventually swallow all

of Europe. As the Dutch looked out over their flooded country towards the apparent fulfillment

of Lisola’s prophecy, the call of universal monarchy and the depiction of Louis XIV as the

enemy of all Europe seemed chillingly real.

Louis XIV had not marched directly northeast from France to the Dutch Republic, which

would have necessitated crossing the Spanish Netherlands en route. Instead, he took his armies

on a slightly circuitous march through the northwestern territories of the Empire.24 Many authors,

including Lisola himself, were outraged by Louis XIV’s actions in Germany. The anonymous

author of a pamphlet written two years after the start of the Franco-Dutch War explained, “it is

true that this war is made directly against the United Provinces,” but, he continued, it is not hard

to see “that it is indirectly against the Empire.”25 Louis XIV’s ambition seemed insatiable; even

while he attacked one state he could not help but make grabs at another.

The French attempted to legally justify their march through Germany by their status as

guarantor of the Peace of Westphalia, but the international writers were unconvinced. Louis XIV

had not consulted the imperial diet to receive permission to move his troops through imperial

24 Lynn, War of Louis XIV, 113.

25 L’Apologiste Refuté Ou Réponce Aux Calumnies de Certain Prétandant Justifier Les Guerres de France, Contre Les Movements & La Justice Des Armes de Sa Majesté Imperiale (Cologne: Martin Lambert, 1674), 47.

16

territories.26 The author of The Apologist Refuted announced in 1674 that what Louis XIV had

done ran “directly contrary to the fundamental constitutions [of the Empire]” and that “The Most

Christian King is a violator of the peace of Westphalia.”27 In a pamphlet from 1675, Lisola

exclaimed that “all of this violence was done against all the forms of law.”28 Outrage over this

violation was again combined with the fear that the “liberty” or the autonomy of the various

German states was under attack. Here, one can see that this new concept still retained its

legalistic meaning in combination with the threat of French ambition. Observers believed that

Louis XIV’s actions in Germany constituted an attempt to conquer German lands as well as

Dutch ones, both additional steps on the road to universal monarchy. Louis XIV wanted “to

kidnap the treasure of liberty” from all of the princes of the Empire and “destroy the ancient

liberty of the German princes.”29

During the Franco-Dutch war, representations of the illegality of France’s actions and

ambitions were embellished by the notion that Louis XIV broke these international laws with

relish. Louis XIV’s armies did not simply march through Germany; they ravaged and rampaged,

apparently unable to contain their thirst for destruction. Lisola argued that in Liège French troops

had “massacred many inhabitants, desolated the flat lands, erected new fortresses where they

have established garrisons, and exercised, finally, all that the cruelest war could allow in an

enemy country.”30 The French marched through territories that were members of the Empire,

26 François-Paul de Lisola, Raisons Politiques Touchant La Guerre d’Allemagne Des An. 1673, 1674, 1675, Ou Les Allemands N’ont Pas Moins Epuisé Leurs Artifices Ordinaires, Que Leurs Forces Dans La Guerre Presente. La Sauce Au Verjus. (Strasbourg, 1675), 49, 58.

27 L’Apologiste Refuté, 19, 43.

28 Lisola, Raisons Politiques, 36.

29 L’Apologiste Refuté, 34; Lisola, Raisons Politiques, 48.

30 Lisola, Raisons Politiques.

17

such as Liège, Cologne, and Cleves, “with so much inhumanity” that it must have meant Louis

XIV was trying to conquer these imperial states for his own.31 Far from upholding the Peace of

Westphalia, France treated the territories in question as if they belonged to a hostile enemy.

Louis XIV had committed what amounted to an act of war. In response, the Emperor, Leopold I

led a league of imperial princes to hinder the passage of French troops, protect the Empire from

Louis XIV’s ambitions to universal monarchy, and to support the Dutch Republic in its struggle

against France.32

While French troops menaced Germany and the Dutch Republic, Louis XIV’s domestic

policies inspired added fear and anxiety in Europe. Domestically, it seemed to the international

audience, Louis XIV had tried to manipulate French laws to acquire more power and authority.

In 1667 and 1673 Louis XIV issued edicts that curtailed the power of the regional judicial courts

known as the parlements, which traditionally had the ability to protest and delay legislation the

magistrates did not agree with. The Civil Procedure of 1667 legitimated the use of royal

authority to force the registration of laws through a ceremony known as the lit de justice.

Another declaration in 1673 decreed that the parlements had to register laws before they

protested, or remonstrated, against them, essentially nullifying the significance of their

protestation.33 Through these decrees Louis XIV attempted to reduce the obstructionism of the

parlements. To the international pamphlet writers this seemed to be symptomatic of Louis XIV’s

characteristic disdain for legal constraints.

31 L’Apologiste Refuté, 12.

32 Ibid., 113–157, see especially 117.

33 John Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements: The Assertion of Royal Authority (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2002), see especially chapter 1, “Compulsory registration and its limits, 1665–1671,” and 2, “Victory over the parlements, 1671–1675.”

18

International authors saw these decrees as oppressing a representative component within

the French state system that could have acted as a restraint on royal power. Parlementaire

authority had previously been “very great” and was “looked upon by all with admiration.” Louis

XIV’s edicts, however, “had stripped it [the parlement] of all its privileges… to show that none

but he [Louis XIV] was master.”34 Once this had been accomplished, Louis XIV could exert his

“supreme power” over France, particularly in the realm of taxation and finances. He could do

what he pleased.35 Interestingly, in the process of making this argument, many authors described

French parlements as the representatives of the people and the “mediator between the people and

the king.”36 The role of the parlements, according to these pamphlets, was to protect the people

from the “tyranny” of the king.37 This, of course, was not how the French parlements worked.

Parlements were nothing like parliament in England, nor even like the imperial Diet system in

the Empire. Magistrates did not officially represent the interests of any distinct group apart from

themselves and their ability to oppose or modify the king’s decrees was far from universally

acknowledged. By portraying the parlements as the last bulwark against royal tyranny, however,

the authors of international propaganda could better make the case that Louis XIV had illegally

usurped all power in France for his own ambitious ends. Although many historians have shown

that in reality, Louis XIV’s power was never as absolute as believed, contemporary perception

34 The Ambitious Practices of France, Or, A Relation of the Ways and Methods Used by Them to Attain to That Supreame Grandeur as Also, the Secret Intrigues of the French King’s Ministers at the Courts of Most of the Princes and States of Europe: With Remarks Thereupon, and Some Reflections on the Interest of Those Princes (London: Printed and are to be sold by Randal Taylor, 1689), 8.

35 Slingsby Bethel, An Account of the French Usurpation upon the Trade of England and What Great Damage the English Do Yearly Sustain by Their Commerce, and How the Same May Be Retrenched, and England Improved in Riches and Interest (London, 1679), 3.

36 Becher, Machiavellus Gallicus, see points 12 and 23; The Ambitious Practices of France, 9.

37 The Ambitious Practices of France, 9.

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said otherwise.38 The international authors concluded that Louis XIV “shared his government

with no one,” and therefore no one within France could stop or restrain the Sun King.39

The final critique that entered the litany of accusations against Louis XIV regarded the

manipulation of religion. It was seen as a maxim of Louis XIV’s state that religion and theology

were subordinate to the king’s will and raison d’état.40 Discussion of Louis XIV’s religiosity

was almost always contrasted to the traditional appellation of French kings, as the “Most

Christian Monarch.”41 For many authors of these pamphlets, the presumptuousness of this title

made Louis XIV’s actual use of religion even more abhorrent. Many international pamphlet

38 The traditional interpretation of the “Absolutist” Louis XIV reads remarkably like the image depicted in many of these later pamphlets: Louis XIV ruled with pure, individual, and absolute authority according to his own will and without regard to law, tradition, religion or the interests of any one apart from himself. He effectively silenced any voice but his own and turned his attention to implementing a strong, centralized, bureaucratic state apparatus to ensure the continuation of his “absolute” power. This interpretation was articulated in the nineteenth century by Tocqueville and persisted through the mid-twentieth century. See Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Régime and the French Revolution, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Anchor Books, 1955), especially part Two; Herbert H. Rowen, “‘L’Etat C’est a Moi’: Louis XIV and the State,” French Historical Studies 2, no. 1 (April 1961): 83–98; Herbert H. Rowen, “Louis XIV and Absolutism,” in Louis XIV and the Craft of Kingship, ed. John C. Rule (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1970), 302–316; Hanley, The Lit de Justice of the Kings of France. Many scholars have since questioned the reality of this absolutist image by highlighting the difficulties facing Louis XIV’s reign and the cooperative and negotiated reality of politics and government in seventeenth century France. See, William Beik, Absolutism and Society in Seventeenth-Century France: State Power and Provincial Aristocracy in Languedoc (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Jeroen Duindam, Myths of Power  : Norbert Elias and the Early Modern European Court (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994); Andrew Lossky, “The Absolutism of Louis XIV: Reality or Myth?,” Canadian Journal of History 19, no. 1 (April 1984): 1–15; Roger Mettam, Power and Faction in Louis XIV’s France (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Jay M. Smith, “‘Our Sovereign’s Gaze’: Kings, Nobles, and State Formation in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 18, no. 2 (October 1, 1993): 396–415; Jay M. Smith, The Culture of Merit: Nobility, Royal Service, and the Making of Absolute Monarchy in France, 1600-1789 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); Nicholas Henshall, The Myth of Absolutism: Change and Continuity in Early Modern European Monarchy (New York: Longman, 1992). This revisionist trend has become so entrenched and well documented that there has even been a reaction against the reaction, see Hurt, Louis XIV and the Parlements. For a more detailed historiographical overview see William Beik, “Review Article: The Absolutism of Louis XIV as Social Collaboration,” Past & Present 188, no. 1 (2005): 195–224.

39 Alexander Christian de Metre, Die Frantzösische Türckey angerichtet durch Die grossen Staats-Männer Ariante und Polidor, Oder Kurtze Erzehlung Der vornehmsten Thaten deß Königs in Franckreich und Was er ferner vorhat, sein Reich in solchen Zustand zu setzen, als das Ottomannische Käyserthumb, umb Zur Monarchie und allgemeinen Beherrschung zu gedeyen 2 Continuatio Der Frantzösischen Türckey, Oder Zweyter Theil: In sich haltend das Werck von Burgund und Lothringen (Rotterdam: Neustadt auff der Kaye, 1673), 4.

40 Becher, Machiavellus Gallicus, see point 13.

41 L’Apologiste Refuté, 28.

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writers criticized Louis XIV for his persecution of Protestants. Often, the international authors

were themselves from Protestant countries – England, the Dutch Republic, or areas in Germany –

but persecutions were also criticized as a reprehensible attempt to further increase royal power.42

The final aspect to Louis XIV’s irreligiousness was his support of the Ottoman Empire. This was

an extremely common critique. Authors frequently emphasized the affinities that Louis XIV had

for the Ottoman style of government and they drew comparisons between the governments of

France and the Ottoman Empire.43 Louis XIV’s support of the Ottoman Invasion and Siege of

Vienna (1683) as well as the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685), which officially made Protestantism

illegal in France, seemed to provide proof for critiques voiced earlier.44

42 Slingsby Bethel, The Interest of the Princes and States of Europe (London: Printed by J.M. for John Wickins, 1681), 39.

43 Lisola, Raisons Politiques, 31; Metre, Die Frantzösische Türckey, especially 15–16; The French Politican Found Out, 19, 21.

44 For references to Louis XIV’s support of the Ottoman Invasion and Siege of Vienna see Courtilz de Sandras, French Intrigues, 150–169; The Ambitious Practices of France, 54–56; Gatien Courtilz de Sandras, The Conduct of France since the Peace at Nimeguen (London: Printed by H. Hills Jun. for William Cademan at the sign of the Popes-head in the New-exchange in the Strand, 1684), 86–92; Der Frantzösische und das Heil. Röm. Reich, verderbende grausame Greuel und Abgott Ludwig der vierzehende, König in Frankreich (Bern, 1689), 32–33; The Intrigues of the French King at Constantinople to Embroil Christendom Discovered in Several Dispatches Past Betwixt Him and the Late Grand Seignior, Grand Vizier and Count Teckily: All of Them Found among That Count’s Papers Seiz’d in December Last: With Some Reflections upon Them. (London: Printed for Dorman Newman, 1689). For references to the Edict of Fontainebleau see Pierre Jurieu, Le Dragon Missionaire, Or, The Dragoon Turn’d Apostle Being a Dialaogue between a French Protestant-Gentleman, and a French Dragoon, Wherein the New-Way of Convverting Hereticks by Dragoons Is Very Lively and Truly Represented: To Which Is Annexed a Letter of Monsieur Jurieu to a French Gentleman of Quality, upon His Dragonary Conversion, Translated out of the Original French; Suppressed in the the Late Reign, but Now Reprinted (N.p., 1686); Les Soupirs de La France Esclave Qui Aspire Après La Liberté (N.p., 1689); The Most Christian Turk: Or, a View of the Life and Bloody Reign of Lewis XIV. Present King of France. Containing an Account of His Monstrous Birth, the Transactions That Happened during His Minority under Cardinal Mazarine; Afterwards His Own Unjust Enterprizes in War and Peace, as Breach of Leagues, Oaths, &c. the Blasphemous Titles given Him, His Love-Intrigues, His Confederacy with the Turk to Invade Christendom, the Creul Persecution of His Protestant Subjects, His Conniving with Pirates, His Unjustly Invading the Empire, &c. Laying All Waste before Him with Fire and Sword, His Quarrels with the Pope and Genoieze, His Treachery against England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Engagements of the Confederate Princes against Him; with All the Battles, Sieges, and Sea Fights, That Have Happened of Consequence to This Time (London: Printed for Henry Rhodes, near Bridelan End, in Fleetstreet, 1690), 71–73; The Present French King Demonstrated an Enemy to the Catholick as Well as Protestant Religion... with a Seasonable Epistle to the Jacobites (London: Printed for Tim. Goodwin, 1691).

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International pamphlet writers during the 1670s depicted Louis XIV as a monarch that

eschewed morality, religion, and laws, international or domestic, in favor of princely interest.

These characteristics earned him the appellation “Machiavellian.” An anonymous pamphlet

printed in 1673 satirically described the maxims of Louis XIV and the French state. One maxim

read: “The people and subjects are created for our [the crown’s] sake, as Machiavelli taught.”45

Other ‘rules’ cited in this pamphlet advocated for the judicious use of lies and trickery in foreign

affairs and government, and the adage that “whoever cannot dissemble should not govern.”46

Another source, published in 1675, was entitled “Machiavellus Gallicus, that is, the

Transformation and Transposition of the Soul of Machiavelli in Louis XIV.” The author, Johann

Joachim Becher, depicted Louis XIV as a pretentious, vain monster, hungry to aggrandize

himself and his state. Becher’s maxims included the subordination of law, theology, and justice

to raison d’état, the better to achieve a universal monarchy.47 The French, according to these

authors, did not honor treaties and never kept their word.48 Louis XIV was bloodthirsty, immoral,

godless, and perfidious. He had the soul of Machiavelli.

The authors of this propaganda created and incorporated new critiques into the critical

discourse in opposition to Louis XIV. The continued experience of warfare and the threat from

France spawned an expanded negative image constructed from newly articulated claims that

45 Theses von der Gerechtigkeit und Berechtigung zum Kriege, jetziger Zeit in Franckreich üblich, welche unterm praesidio derer Staats-Erfahrnen Professoren, der Herrn de Lionne und Colbert.: Wider aller Rechts-Gelehrten Einwürffe zu defendiren sich vorgeletzt. Ludovicus der XIV. König in Franckreich und Navarra (N.p., 1673), First page.

46 Ibid., fifth page, points 47, 48, 49 and first page, point 9.

47 Becher, Machiavellus Gallicus. See specifically points 13 and 15 for the subordination of theology and justice to politics. Becher describes Louis XIV’s suppression of the parlements and manipulation of French law in points 12 and 23. See point 6 for the plan to impose universal monarchy across the globe.

48 This sentiment is almost ubiquitous throughout all the pamphlets from the War of Devolution through the War of the Spanish Succession.

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Louis XIV was immoral, irreligious, and inhumane. Louis XIV was labeled as a Machiavellian

prince. Here one can clearly see the results of the work of the bricoleurs who wrote these

pamphlets. In response to continued crisis and conflict, international bricoleurs incorporated a

stock of new critiques and comparisons with which to construct an image that better reflected

their experiences and better fit with the heightened anxieties and passions of opposing the French

monarch.

23

CHAPTER III

The French Tyrant

The stock of critiques developed in the 1670s – that Louis XIV was ambitious, law-

breaking, immoral, and irreligious - continued to be repeated and repackaged in pamphlets

throughout Louis XIV’s reign. The authors of these pamphlets continued to engage in bricolage,

recombining ideas taken form political theory, religion, and direct experiences – both new and

old – but the scale of denigration increased as the stakes of restraining Louis XIV were raised.

While the basic contours of Louis XIV’s image remained the same, the rhetoric developed in the

1670s jelled into a more comprehensive rejection of the Sun King and his style of government

after the experiences of the 1680s. Continued war, religious persecution and the threat of

conquest reinforced the fears and anxieties posed by Louis XIV’s government. Earlier critiques

often focused on specific deeds and failings of Louis XIV’s policies; by 1689 these pamphlets

projected a consolidated image of Louis XIV’s style of kingship and held it up as morally

reprehensible. A closer analysis of three pamphlets from the end of the decade reveals that the

image of Louis XIV as an all-powerful, tyrannical, depraved, irreverent monster was articulated

in a way that demanded a moral revulsion against the ‘absolutism’ of Louis XIV.

The Franco-Dutch war came to a close in 1678 through a series of treaties signed at the

Dutch city of Nijmegen. It would be another decade before Europe again joined forces militarily

to oppose Louis XIV, but those ten years were fraught with other crises. The decade opened with

what can be seen as Christian Europe’s greatest nightmare: the threat of Ottoman conquest. In

1681 Ottoman troops began to push at the boundary that separated the Ottoman Empire from the

Habsburg Empire. In 1683 the ‘enemies of Christendom’ arrived at the gates of the imperial

capital, Vienna, as Leopold I escaped with his pregnant wife up the Danube. Under papal

24

sponsorship, a Christian league was formed to rescue Christendom from the ‘Turkish menace.’49

France was the only major Catholic power that did not join.50 Instead, in the same year, Louis

XIV initiated an extremely controversial policy in which he seized and annexed territories on the

German border. These “reunions” were based on specious territorial claims decided by special

courts, always in Louis XIV’s favor.51

These two events reinforced the image of Louis XIV as opportunistic and an enemy of

Christendom. Further augmentation of this image was provided by Louis XIV’s promulgation of

the Edict of Fontainebleau in 1685, which formally outlawed Protestantism in France. The

ensuing forced conversions carried out by French dragoons horrified many onlookers, including

Pope Innocent XI.52 A mere three years later public opinion was galvanized again by the events

of 1688. During the ‘Glorious Revolution,’ James II, a Francophile whose emulation of Louis

XIV’s government contributed to his unpopularity, was removed from the throne in favor of the

Dutch Staatholder William III, a staunch French opponent.53 Fighting broke out between

England, the Dutch Republic, and France. In the same year, Louis XIV attacked the Empire.

Most of the imperial states had formed the League of Augsburg in 1686, a defensive league to

49 For discussions of how the Turks were imagined by Europeans see Thomas Kaiser, “The Evil Empire? The Debate on Turkish Despotism in Eighteenth-Century French Political Culture,” The Journal of Modern History 72, no. 1 (March 1, 2000): 6–34; Paula Fichtner, Terror and Toleration: The Habsburg Empire Confronts Islam, 1526-1850 (London: Reaktion, 2008).

50 John Stoye, The Siege of Vienna, New ed., corr. (Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2006).

51 Lynn, War of Louis XIV, 37–38.

52 Steven Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 122–124.

53 Pincus argues that the 1688 Revolution was the triumph of a Dutch-inspired process of modernization over James II’s French-inspired process taken from the example of Louis XIV. Pincus, 1688; Steven C. A. Pincus, “From Butterboxes to Wooden Shoes: The Shift in English Popular Sentiment from Anti-Dutch to Anti-French in the 1670s,” The Historical Journal 38, no. 2 (June 1, 1995): 333–361; A Letter Written by the Emperor to the Late King James, Setting Forth the True Occasion of His Fall, and the Treachery and Cruelty of the French (London: Printed for Ric. Chiswell, 1689).

25

protect the Empire from the aggression of France. Louis XIV attacked in 1688 in what he

claimed was a preemptive defensive strike against the League. In 1689, England and the Dutch

Republic joined the League of Augsburg, which once again pitted the forces of Europe against

Louis XIV’s France in a conflict that would last for close to a decade.54 Events of the 1680s

seemed to confirm that Louis XIV and his style of government were ambitious, belligerent,

irreligious and immoral by nature.

By the end of the 1680s, the international European community had watched as the

pamphlet writers’ critiques of Louis XIV played out over and over again, reconfirmed with each

repetition. An example from 1689 demonstrates this consolidation in combination with a

significant amount of hyperbole. The pamphlet, the title of which translates as The French and

the Holy Roman Empire, Depraved, Horrible Atrocities and the False Idol Louis XIV, King in

France, was published anonymously by a German author deeply concerned with the fate of the

Empire. As can be seen by the title alone, this pamphleteer left no doubt about the moral reaction

he intended readers to have.

The anonymous author of The French and the Holy Roman Empire incorporated familiar

critiques, but they were pushed to a new extreme. Louis XIV had frequently been portrayed as an

unchristian ruler, despite his preferred moniker. The author of this work took that idea one step

further. He professed a close relationship between Louis XIV, “this most-unchristian antichrist,”

and the Devil.55 France was described as the “earthly paradise” of “the old snake of Satan.”56 The

author argued that Louis XIV’s actions were driven by satanic influence and even described the

54 Lynn, War of Louis XIV, 39, 191–265; Black, European International Relations, 95–99.

55 Der Frantzösische und das Heil. Röm. Reich, 7.

56 Ibid., 1.

26

devil as the king’s mentor.57 Louis XIV was variously accused of being nefarious, bloodthirsty,

and impious, Satan’s firstborn child, and a tyrant who devoured land and spilled innocent

Christian blood. The author of The French and the Holy Roman Empire built upon previously

articulated criticisms, but his use of excessive hyperbole depicted not just Louis XIV’s actions in

a negative light, but his person and character as well. Louis XIV’s government as a whole was

monstrous.

Louis XIV’s style of government was so repugnant it could only be described in one way:

tyrannical. The tyrannical Louis XIV ruled with absolute power over France, which allowed him

to exercise all his villainy without any interference. The nobility of France could not be

compared to even the lowest princes in Germany, because the former were “poor slaves” who

had to do whatever pleased the king. The princes of the blood, the king’s own immediate family,

had little more than their titles. The non-elites had it even worse: the author argued that French

cattle were better off than French farmers.58 The author of this pamphlet offered these details up

as a warning to the princes of the Empire of the fate that awaited them if Louis XIV was allowed

to succeed in his ambitious conquests. The author also saw this tyranny and absolute power as

the key that allowed Louis XIV to always pursue his “desires,” which resulted in so much

destruction and bloodshed.59 This pamphlet ends with what reads like a veiled threat to Louis

XIV, which could have provided some hope to an anxious, fearful audience: “History clearly

shows that one knows very few Tyrants, who either came to a good end or escaped without

horrible punishment and the extirpation of their wretched offspring.”60 Although not explicit, the

57 Ibid., 28. The term used in the original is “Lehr–Meister.”

58 Ibid., 31.

59 The term used over and over is “Begierde”, desire, lust, or appetite.

60 Der Frantzösische und das Heil. Röm. Reich, 36.

27

author intimated that, whether in this life or the next, Louis XIV would be punished for the

crimes he had committed. The moral, honest, good people of Europe needed to band together to

oppose, maybe even overthrow, the undoubtedly tyrannical government of Louis XIV.

In order to construct this image, the author incorporated quotes taken directly from

previous pamphlets. This provides direct evidence of the cross-fertilization that occurred among

authors of this propaganda. For example, this author also described the state maxims of France.

He used recycled phrases that evoked an all-powerful monarch who had no regard for ethics or

the needs of his subjects. “Subjects and people are, after the beliefs of Machiavelli, created for

his [the monarch’s] sake.” A monarch’s actions were sufficiently justified by his will and desire.

“Whoever cannot dissemble, should not rule.” Lies were legitimate and useful tools of state.61

The author’s recital of these maxims reads almost word-for-word like those in the earlier

pamphlet Theses on the Justice and Justification of Wars (1673).62 This repetition clearly

demonstrates that the international authors responsible for these documents borrowed ideas from

each other and built on each other’s constructions. These two pamphlets were published almost

two decades apart, and yet the phrasing and intention are almost identical. The stock of critiques

developed in the 1670s were still employed at the end of the 1680s, in this case almost word for

word. But the later documents presented these critiques as a more cohesive image that, especially

when combined with excessive hyperbole, demanded a denunciation of Louis XIV’s style of

government. By 1689, the French tyrant had to be condemned.

The second pamphlet, anonymously printed in 1690, called for a condemnation of Louis

XIV from the outset. The title of this pamphlet was spectacular in its avowedly “neutral”

61 Ibid., 6; Theses von der Gerechtigkeit und Berechtigung zum Kriege, 1, 5.

62 Theses von der Gerechtigkeit und Berechtigung zum Kriege.

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depiction of Louis XIV as a monster. It began, “The most Christian Turk: or, a View of the Life

and Bloody Reign of Lewis XIV” with a description of his “monstrous birth,” “unjust

enterprises,” “breach of leagues, oaths, &c.,” his blasphemy, arguments with the Pope,

philandering, and conspiracy with the Ottoman empire, “the cruel persecution” of his subjects

and unjust invasion of the Empire, and a general discussion of how the sun king had laid “all

waste before him with Fire and Sword.”63 This title page was accompanied by a frontispiece that

depicted Louis XIV astride a horse. Underneath the back legs of his rearing horse was a globe of

the world, which symbolized Louis XIV’s apparent desire to place the entire globe under his

control. The Sun King holds a sword in one hand and a firebrand in the other, and is assisted by a

member of the French clergy on one side and a Turkish aristocrat on the other. In the background

of this scene one can see a village burning and women being attacked by soldiers. The caption to

this image reads, “Behold the Christians’ Scourge by fortune hurl’d, like Damn’d Pandora’s Box,

to plague the world. No Leagues or oaths bind this Leviathan; with fire and sword he madly

rushes on.”64 Louis XIV was depicted as sent by God to plague Christendom with war, death,

and misery.

This anonymous author used critiques of Louis XIV that have been seen again and again:

bloodthirsty, ambitious, and perfidious. However, this author exaggerated and illustrated these

critiques with stunning language. In this pamphlet, the author did not accuse Louis XIV’s

63 The full title reads “The Most Christian Turk: Or, a View of the Life and Bloody Reign of Lewis XIV. Present King of France. Containing an Account of his Monstrous Birth, the Transactions that happened during his Minority under Cardinal Mazarine; afterwards his own unjust Enterprizes in War and Peace, as Breach of Leagues, Oaths, &c. the blasphemous Titles given him, his Love-Intrigues, his Confederacy with the turk to Invade Christendom, the creul Persecution of his Protestant Subjects, his Conniving with Pirates, his unjustly Invading the Empire, &c. laying all Waste before him with Fire and Sword, his Quarrels with the Pope and Genoieze, his Treachery against England, Scotland, and Ireland, the Engagements of the confederate Princes against him; with all the Battles, Sieges, and Sea Fights, that have happened of Consequence to this Time.”

64 The Most Christian Turk, See title page.

29

soldiers of inhumane acts or excesses committed on the battlefield. Instead, the author accused

Louis XIV of having “fattened himself with Christian blood.”65 The author wrote, “it seems the

Most Christian King delights most in shedding Christian blood, and his zeal for religion is

manifested, in burning, and blowing up churches of all Christian persuasions.”66 Louis XIV

personally reveled in bloodshed and the slaughter of innocents. The fact that these innocents

were Christians, Catholics as well as Protestants, further reinforced the irreligiousness of Louis

XIV while it also portrayed his atrocities as that much more heinous. The “Most Christian King”

committed these bloody crimes upon fellow Christians. This author viewed Louis XIV as the

scourge of Christendom, the “troubler of Europe,” who left fire, death, and destruction in the

wake of his ambition.67 Because Louis XIV aspired to universal dominion over the entire world,

nobody was safe from the bloody execution of his ambitious designs. The Sun King tried to build

a universal monarchy “with the untempered mortar of rapine and violence.”68

This inhumanity and ambition also caused Louis XIV to break his word and violate

treaties and oaths. From the beginning of his reign, the Sun King showed a tendency towards

perfidiousness. Every treaty or agreement that Louis XIV made was either viewed as a way for

him to buy time by luring enemies into a false sense of security, or a malicious deception made

in terms of friendship but really aimed at undermining the power of his “allies.”69 Louis XIV’s

associations with the Ottoman Empire also exemplified his perfidiousness. At the same time that

he professed friendship and support for all of Christendom, the “Most Christian King” aided and

65 Ibid., 1.

66 Ibid., 101.

67 Ibid., 181.

68 Ibid., 111.

69 Ibid., for examples see 15–16, 32, and 65–67.

30

abetted Christendom’s greatest enemy. When he referred to the Turkish invasion and Siege of

Vienna in 1683, the author of this pamphlet exclaims that the princes of the Empire could not tell

“which of these Turks they ought most to fear,” the Ottoman Sultan or Louis XIV.70

Although inhumanity, ambition, and a desire for universal monarchy are not new

critiques, this author articulated them in a register not yet encountered. The desperation and

seriousness of the author’s discussion is exemplified by the two comparative frameworks he

places Louis XIV within: Louis XIV as the “Most Christian Turk” and Louis XIV as the

“Leviathan.” As seen above, other authors also drew comparisons between Louis XIV and the

“despotic” Ottoman emperor. But in this work this comparison was central, as can be seen

clearly by the title. This comparison evoked all of the negative qualities associated with the

Turks: despotic, licentious, hypocritical, and oppressive.71 But when he replaced the word

“monarch” with “Turk” in a play on the traditional title of the French kings, the author of this

work made an even more scathing indictment of Louis XIV. Instead of the apogee of Christian

zeal and piety, Louis XIV was a paradox. He was a Christian Turk. The Turks, in the

seventeenth-century European framework, were the enemies of Christendom. Thus, a Turk that

professed to be the “Most Christian” evoked an image of infiltration, an attempt to undermine

Europe from within by posing as a Christian. Louis XIV was thus an even greater threat to the

people of Europe than the actual Ottoman emperor.

This author also frequently described Louis XIV as a Leviathan. This critique first

appeared in the caption to the frontispiece, which depicted Louis XIV burning and pillaging to

conquer the world. In every example after this the phrase is intimately connected with Louis

70 Ibid., 103.

71 Kaiser, “The Evil Empire?,” 8.

31

XIV’s unrestrained ambition. This term, taken from Hobbes’s work of political theory by the

same name, evoked the specter of absolute power. Hobbes’s leviathan was the power to which

every citizen in a society submitted absolutely after he or she entered into the social contract.72

But, as previously discussed, Louis XIV’s absolute power was seen to be the result of an

unnatural and illegal appropriation of power. Neither the parlements, nor laws, nor morality

could constrain the execution of Louis XIV’s absolute power. Whereas Hobbes had viewed

absolute power as a way to protect citizens from the harsh realities of the state of nature, Louis

XIV’s absolute power seemed to lead to even more ruthless and savage outcomes. The author of

this pamphlet thus employed a mutated version of the Leviathan in his pamphlet. This Leviathan

could not be bound by words or promises. He devoured provinces and territories without any

thought for rights or legal claims. Louis XIV’s ambition, bloodthirsty nature, perfidiousness, and

absolute power were all combined to create the particular version of the Leviathan “who floats

on seas of blood with vast desire, to out-brave Heav’n and set the World on fire.”73

A fascinating aspect to this pamphlet is that the author vehemently defended his

neutrality despite the obvious exaggeration and bias against Louis XIV. To portray oneself as

impartial was, of course, a commonly employed rhetorical strategy. But the author of this

pamphlet worked unusually hard to convince his readers of his neutrality, especially in light of

the far-from-neutral title. The author appealed to the common experience of his audience: years

and years of opposition to Louis XIV and life under the fear of conquest, oppression, and

persecution, whether threatened, impending, or actual. Although the reader, “at first view,”

would surely have expected this pamphlet to have been written “by some prejudiced hand,” the

72 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. A.P. Martinich (Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 2002). The original was published in 1651.

73 The Most Christian Turk, 181.

32

reader simply needed to “consult the actions of this Monarch” to realize the impartial truth of the

author’s claims.74 Throughout the pamphlet, in fact, the discussion and depiction of Louis XIV

was closely tied to the political history of his reign. Although the explanations of intent and

motivation are usually exaggerated or invented, the actual events of Louis XIV’s reign are more

or less accurately depicted. This illustrates the very real effect that Louis XIV’s actions and

policies had on his international image. Louis XIV’s politics and diplomacy created such anxiety,

fear, and horror that this author could plausibly argue for impartiality based simply on the facts

of the French tyrant’s reign.

The Most Christian Turk particularly emphasized the inhumanity and immorality of

Louis XIV’s bloodthirsty nature. The French and the Holy Roman Empire played upon Louis

XIV’s irreligiousness when the author accused the king of collusion with the Devil. Each of

these authors used the same critiques of Louis XIV that were developed in the 1670s, but they

employed them within a more cohesive, hyperbolic, and morally reprehensible image of Louis

XIV’s style of government. The third pamphlet to be discussed in this section provides yet

another example of this. The Sighs of France Enslaved Yearning after Liberty (1689) was written

by a French author with protestant sympathies.75 Although this work has been described as

atypical for the period, when it is placed in its international context it is clear that it fits squarely

within this discourse that articulated a cohesive image of the monstrous French tyrant.76

74 Ibid., see first page of the Preface.

75 Les Soupirs de La France. There is some debate over the author of this pamphlet. It has been attributed to the French Protestant exile, Pierre Jurieu. See, Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, 148. There is some debate regarding the accuracy of this claim, however. See, Nannerl Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France: The Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 316, also FN 11 on same page.

76 The direct quote regarding The Sighs of France is as follows: “There had been few references to royal tyranny in French politics for many years, except to round out standard classifications of regimes. The Soupirs departed form such academic pigeonholing to equate French absolutism with the most cruel tyranny.” From Keohane, Philosophy and the State in France, 317.

33

In this work, the author again recapitulated most of the same critiques of Louis XIV, but

he articulated them in more expansive and exaggerated terms. His goal, as stated in the title, was

to show how the Sun King had enslaved France with his “despotic and arbitrary power.”77 The

use of “slavery” here is completely different from Lisola’s. “Slavery” in this work did not refer

to the autonomy of states, but to the well-being and personal liberty of people. Through this shift

in meaning one can see that opinion of Louis XIV had changed radically since 1667. He had

become a monster, a tyrant, whose ambition, self-interest, and belligerence constituted a personal

threat to the lives and livelihoods of everyone in Europe. Universal monarchy now became the

threat of universal enslavement.

The first major point that the author made to illustrate the enslavement of France, and one

which he returned to often throughout the work, was how Louis XIV had subjected the Church to

royal control. The author argued that the revocation of the Edict of Nantes was just an example

of the king’s despotic power. Far from benefiting the Catholic Church, the Edict of

Fontainebleau accomplished nothing but to disturb the peace of the realm. Because of the

horrific policy of forced conversions, hundreds of thousands of good, French citizens ran for the

borders. Louis XIV desolated France of some of its best subjects, which ruined commerce and

drained the realm of money. This behavior was even more appalling because the king himself

was not a good Christian. Even as Louis XIV claimed to propagate the true faith, he acted in a

manner fit for an anti-Christian monarch, fit for a Turk. In the aftermath of the Edict of

Fontainebleau, it seemed clear that Louis XIV believed he was the absolute master of the life,

liberty, religion, and conscience of his subjects, to do with as he pleased.78 The author explicitly

77 Les Soupirs de La France, 44.

78 Ibid., 29–34.

34

described the moral reaction one had to these policies. This was a “maxim that made one shudder

and be horrified when one considered the consequences” that had played out in France.79

When he made his decisions, Louis XIV had no recourse to law or advisory bodies that

could temper his absolute authority and despotic power. The author repeated the familiar

sentiment that “the king of France does not believe himself to be bound by any laws, his will is

the rule.”80 In most countries, the author explained, subjects could count on law and justice to

ensure the maintenance of their freedom, but in France even honest and innocent men were

subject to the arbitrary whims of the king.81 The author also once again referenced the

subjugation of the parlements, as well as the lack of Estates in France. He read into these

institutions the same representative capacity discussed previously in order to argue that Louis

XIV had unnaturally assumed all power himself.82 Because there was no law but the king’s will,

Louis XIV had “the power of life and death” over all his subjects, as if they were slaves, “which

is precisely what we are,” the author exclaimed.83

The author compared the morally repugnant depiction of Louis XIV with something not

yet encountered: a description of how a king should be. The author explained, in language

clearly influenced by emerging social contract theories, that “the people have established kings

to preserve their persons, life, liberty, and personal estates.” By enslaving the population of

France and subjecting their life, liberty, and property to his arbitrary power, Louis XIV had not

fulfilled his duty. His government in fact, was the inverse of the social contract: Louis XIV acted

79 Ibid., 30.

80 Ibid., 29.

81 Ibid., 40–41.

82 Ibid., 35, see also Memoires VI–XI.

83 Ibid., 41.

35

as if his subjects were only there to benefit him. The author illustrated this situation when he

discussed the heavy and unjust taxation imposed throughout France. Louis XIV extracted

immense sums through violence and excess, all to satisfy his own pleasure. The author depicted

this situation in vivid language: “A thousand channels are open by which he [Louis XIV] draws

the blood of the people and the subjects in order to pour it down the abyss of insatiable greed and

unmeasured ambition of the Prince.”84 Taxes, like the power of the king, were supposed to be

used for the good of the state and the people. Instead, the excessive amounts that Louis XIV

squeezed out of his subjects were used for nothing but the service, the interests, and the

preservation of the king himself, “which is to say his grandeur and glory.”85 With the people’s

money, Louis XIV built grand palaces such as Versailles, he staged operas and ballets, he bought

agents in foreign courts, and he unjustly conquered provinces to which he had no right. He paid

for his numerous armies, which had committed inhumane atrocities and caused misery and

desolation throughout Europe.86 Louis XIV’s self-interest, pride, and ambition were “an abyss so

vast that it will engulf not only the good people of the realm, but those of all the other states [as

well].” Louis XIV’s enslavement of France was complete, but his universal enslavement of

Europe was just around the corner.

Blood, enslavement and horror characterized Louis XIV’s government, according to the

depictions forward by the international authors of these pamphlets. These depictions demanded a

moral condemnation of Louis XIV’s style of government. Through the incorporation of concepts

of Lockean social contract theory, the author of The Sighs of France advocated explicitly for

84 Ibid., 18.

85 Ibid., 23.

86 Ibid., 26–27.

36

action as well as denunciation.87 This author defined tyranny as the rule of a monarch, “who does

everything for his own interest and not for that of the people.”88 Louis XIV was clearly a tyrant.

In the second half of the work, the author argued that since Louis XIV did not rule as a good,

dutiful monarch, the French should work to reform their government and reestablish it along its

ancient foundations. These foundations, according to this author, were based on an elective

monarchy and representative estates that ensured the interests of the people would be preserved.

With this idealization, also articulated by other French intellectuals, the author incorporated

contemporary political theory and an affinity for constitutionalism that had emerged during and

after the English Revolution.89 But the need to invoke these ancient ideals of government grew

because Louis XIV, or the image of Louis XIV painted in these pamphlets, was a tyrant who

needed to be stopped.

Through these examples one can see that by 1689 the negative image of Louis XIV had

coalesced in response to years of warfare and crisis. The images in this propaganda were created

through the combination of concepts from previous pamphlets, embellished by the recurrent

experience of crisis, supported and framed with ideas of political theory, religion, and philosophy.

The experiences of the 1680s contributed to a depiction of not just Louis XIV as an individual

monarch, but of his entire style of government. This style of kingship was morally reprehensible

and even contradicted the purpose for which all kings were empowered. If Louis XIV’s style of 87 Locke argued that subjects have the right to overthrow or remove a monarch who was not fulfilling his duties to the people. This view of the social contract differs from that of Hobbes, for instance, which viewed the contract as inviolable, once subjects entered in to it they gave up all control to the ruling power. See, John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. Macpherson, 1st ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett Pub. Co., 1980); Hobbes, Leviathan.

88 Les Soupirs de La France, 42.

89 A strikingly similar image of the French past was articulated by a contemporary of Fénelon, and fellow member of the Burgundy Circle, Henri de Boulainvilliers. For a discussion of Boulainvilliers’ writings and his interpretation of French history see, Harold Ellis, Boulainvilliers and the French Monarchy: Aristocratic Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988).

37

government was immoral, irreligious, and inhumane, then how should a king have ruled to fulfill

his duties as a sovereign? This is a question that Fénelon answered in Telemachus.

38

CHAPTER IV

Fénelon’s Benevolent Patriarch

Fénelon wrote Telemachus as a guide for Louis XIV’s heir and grandson, to counteract

the example set by Louis XIV himself. In this work, Fénelon described how an ideal king should

act in terms that were reminiscent of The Sighs of France. In the earlier pamphlet, the author

argued that kings were given their power in order to preserve the life, liberty and property of his

subjects. Fénelon took this understanding one step further. For Fénelon, a good king acted as

“the father of his subjects” and always worked for their benefit.90 The king should be a

benevolent patriarch, one who led his subjects to prosperity, peace and happiness and subsumed

his personal desires to the good of the community. Not simply required to protect his subjects,

Fénelon’s ideal king was expected to contribute to the prosperity of his subjects. The

interpretations of both Fénelon and the anonymous author of The Sighs of France were responses

to the negative image of Louis XIV developed in international propaganda. The Sighs of France

was published in 1689 at the beginning of the Nine Years War; Telemachus was published in

1699 shortly after the war had come to an end and in the midst of the simmering tensions that

would erupt into the last, and longest, conflict of Louis XIV’s reign, the War of the Spanish

Succession (1701-1714).91 Both of these authors drew from experiences of living through Louis

90 François de Salignac de La Mothe- Fénelon, Telemachus, Son of Ulysses, ed. Patrick Riley (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 60.

91 Although war did not break out until 1701, the issue of succession to the Spanish throne had been hotly debated for years. The War of Devolution, for instance, was a conflict caused by essentially the same succession issues. When it became clear that Charles II was unlikely to ever have children, the powers of Europe attempted to find a solution. Several partition treaties and possible compromises were discussed or signed in the years leading up to 1701, but for a variety of diplomatic and contingent reasons, including the death of the “compromise candidate,” war was not, in the end, avoided. This possibility was well known in the last years of the seventeenth century and is considered to be one reason why the Nine Years War ended, to free up armies for the next battle. See Black, European International Relations; Lynn, War of Louis XIV; Marsha Frey and Linda Frey, A Question of Empire: Leopold I and the War of Spanish Succession, 1701-1705 (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1983). The issue of the Spanish Succession was also something discussed in the international propaganda, even after the War of

39

XIV’s reign, as well as from the international critical discourse that had developed in regard to

Louis XIV.

François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon was a French cleric appointed as the

archbishop of Cambrai in 1695. He served at the court of Louis XIV as tutor to the king’s

grandson and heir, the duc de Bourgogne. Fénelon was a member of the reform-minded group

around the duc de Bourgogne known as the Burgundy circle.92 Fénelon wrote Telemachus to be

an instructional guide for the duc de Bourgogne, to teach him how to be a good king. Fénelon

constructed this allegorical tale as an extension of the Odyssey. Set in ancient Greece after the

Trojan wars, this story followed Odysseus’s son, Telemachus, and his tutor, Mentor, who was

actually the goddess of wisdom in disguise. Mentor’s role was to teach Telemachus about the

difficulties of being king and to instruct him in the proper way to fulfill his duties as a monarch.

This presents an interesting contrast to the image of Louis XIV that developed in The French and

the Holy Roman Empire, in which the Devil, not the goddess of wisdom, guided the Sun King to

ruin and misery.93 Mentor and Telemachus traveled around the Mediterranean and encountered

various types of rulers as they went. In this way, Fénelon presented his protagonists with a

multitude of examples of kings, good and bad, which allowed Mentor and Telemachus to dissect

the merits and drawbacks of each.

One of the most favorably depicted monarchs encountered by Telemachus and Mentor

was King Sesostris of Egypt. Sesostris ruled through peace and made all of his people love him,

instead of exerting control through fear, as did his monstrous son. Sesostris “looked upon himself

Devolution. See for example Bethel, The Interest of the Princes and States of Europe, page 7 in preface (unnumbered) and 59.

92 For more about the Burgundy Circle see, Ellis, Boulainvilliers.

93 Der Frantzösische und das Heil. Röm. Reich, 28.

40

as king for no other purpose but the good of his subjects, whom he loved as his own children.”94

His son, on the other hand, “counted men as nothing, believing that they were only made for

him.” This description almost exactly mirrors selections about Louis XIV from international

propaganda.95 “He thought of nothing but how to gratify his passions… to oppress his subjects,

and suck the blood of the unfortunate.”96 King Sesostris’s death was met with tears and

lamentations from his “inconsolable” subjects, his son was considered “a monster, and not a

king,” the Egyptians rebelled against the son, who was killed in the ensuing civil wars.97 When

he reflected on this foolish king’s fate, Telemachus lamented “Ah! How wretched is that man

destined to reign for the good of the public, if he thinks he is master of so many lives for no other

reason but to make them miserable!”98 The comparison between the beloved and respected

Sesostris and his despised son clearly shows that Fénelon valued a benevolent, patriarchal king

over one who used his power and position only to further his own desires. The job of a king was

to ensure the safety and prosperity of his subjects, just as the job of a father was to ensure the

safety and prosperity of his children.

To successfully act as a good father to one’s subjects depended upon three main

concepts: avoiding luxury by encouraging agriculture and trade, rejecting absolute power, and

disdaining expansionist ambition. Louis XIV followed none of these precepts. In the first case,

Louis XIV is remembered even today for his incredible consumption and embrace of luxury.

94 Fénelon, Telemachus, 18.

95 See Theses von der Gerechtigkeit und Berechtigung zum Kriege, first page, point 6; Der Frantzösische und das Heil. Röm. Reich, sixth page.

96 Fénelon, Telemachus, 26.

97 Ibid., 26–28.

98 Ibid., 28.

41

Versailles stood as testament to the king’s luxurious lifestyle and this was certainly not lost on

his contemporary critics.99 In contrast, Fénelon emphasized the benefit of encouraging

agriculture, instead of luxury, as the basis for a prosperous and truly wealthy society. Towards

the end of their journey, Telemachus and Mentor arrived at the newly created city of King

Idomeneus. Mentor noticed some serious flaws in the structure of his new kingdom and worked

to correct these mistakes. The biggest problem was that Idomeneus had spent a significant

amount of money and manpower to make a beautiful, luxurious city in the vain supposition that

luxury would enhance his power. Mentor redirected that manpower towards the uncultivated

land in Idomeneus’s possession. Mentor argued that true wealth came from prosperous subjects

and that thriving agriculture would stimulate trade and growth.100 This reflected the ideal that

kings ruled to benefit their subjects. Louis XIV’s unethical, Machiavellian, style of ruling

accomplished the exact opposite.101

The second key to ruling as a benevolent patriarch was to reject the desire to rule

absolutely. In fact, Fénelon portrayed absolute power as a false power. He explained: “The

countries where the power of the sovereign is most absolute are those where the sovereigns are

least powerful.”102 Absolute power allowed one to take, exploit, and destroy whatever one

wished, but this would only result in the impoverishment of one’s subjects and the subsequent

enervation of one’s state. Since a king’s true power derived from the wealth of his people, the

true path to power was to protect and support the interests of the people. Mentor summarized this

99 For example, see Les Soupirs de La France, 24, 25.

100 Fénelon, Telemachus, See especially Book X and XVII.

101 This sentiment was also widespread regarding specifically economic thought in France under Louis XIV. See Rothkrug, Opposition to Louis XIV.

102 Fénelon, Telemachus, 170.

42

inverse relationship when he described a king with ‘absolute power.’ Mentor warned, “as his

power is absolute, his subjects by consequence are all slaves.”103 The idea of slavery had

changed from a legalistic understanding to the imposition of absolute power to oppress the

people. In this quote Fénelon echoed the same sentiment seen in multiple examples of

international propaganda. Fénelon tried to show that the enslavement of one’s subjects did not

increase one’s power at all. “When kings once begin to think that their absolute wills are the only

laws… their power indeed is uncontrolled: but by the exercise of such a power, they sap the

foundation of it.”104 Absolute power led only to incredibly weak and feeble states populated by

miserable slaves.

The best method to avoid absolute power was to have a healthy respect for law. Laws

were instituted, according to Fénelon, to restrain kings from an abuse of their power. They did

not hinder a king from doing good, only from oppressing and subjecting his people to slavery.

Thus, laws could act as a check on the selfish interests of a bad king, but they enhanced the

potential benefit of a good king. On the Isle of Crete, the laws of Minos, grandfather of

Idomeneus, were highly revered. Mentor explained that the king of Crete “can do anything to the

people; but the laws can do anything to him.”

He has an absolute power in doing good, but his hands are tied from doing wrong… the intention of the laws is that one man by his wisdom and moderation should promote the happiness of such numbers and not that such numbers by their misery and abject slavery should serve to flatter the pride and luxury of a single man… It is not for himself that the gods have made him king, but for his subjects, whose welfare he is to study, and to whom he owes all his time, all his cares, and all his affections.105

103 Ibid.

104 Ibid., 296.

105 Ibid., 60–61.

43

If laws were not heeded, the kingdom would descend into slavery, misery and oppression.

According to the international propaganda, Louis XIV routinely violated and manipulated laws

for his own benefit. As a result, his absolute power oppressed and enslaved his miserable

subjects. Through these examples in Telemachus, Fénelon tried to steer his young charge away

from the example of his grandfather. Louis XIV did not preoccupy himself with the good of his

subjects, and instead spent all his time, care, and affection on himself, his own power, and his

own ambition.

Louis XIV’s ambition resulted in war after war to expand his power and glory. Fénelon

detested this expansionist ambition and repeatedly pointed out the absurdity of venerating any

king for conquering new territory. “Of what advantage is it to any people that their king brings

other nations under their yoke,” Fénelon asked. Warfare only caused misery and destruction, for

the “victorious nation almost as much as the vanquished nation.”106 Even for the king, the lure of

conquest was a false glimmer, for one could not conquer a governed territory except against the

will of that territory’s inhabitants. Conquest, therefore, brought only “the false glory of keeping

them [conquered subjects] in slavery,” which was no achievement at all.107 True glory stemmed

from ruling over a prosperous land in peace and happiness, not from “laying waste the earth and

spreading far and near… the woes of carnage, confusion, terror, despondency, consternation,

devouring famine, and despair.”108 Warfare, even when just, was destructive. Warfare that had

no legitimate justification, as the international authors argued vehemently for each of Louis

106 Ibid., 69.

107 Ibid., 111.

108 Ibid., 168–9.

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XIV’s conflicts, created misery, poverty, and despair. The only war a benevolent patriarch

should engage in, according to Fénelon, was when “necessity requires it… to save the people.”109

Fénelon’s benevolent patriarch was constructed out of the stock of ideas available to the

royal tutor. His sentiments are reflective of a wider trend in the late seventeenth century that

began to question the absolute power of divine-right monarchs and to emphasize a more ethical

and moral alternative to the “Machiavellian prince.” But the desperate need for this alternative

originated in the experiences of crisis after crisis caused by the policies of Louis XIV. The

“Machiavellian prince” that Fénelon tried to replace and reform was created by international

propaganda. Fénelon’s work allows us to assess the direct impact that these pamphlets had on the

creation of a new idea of kingship, one that emphasized restraint and duty. From the vignette

about Idomeneus, one can see that Fénelon was acutely aware, and perhaps even clandestinely

read, the pamphlets that comprised this critical international discourse.110

When Telemachus and Mentor arrived at Idomeneus’s new city, Salente, on the coast of

Hesperia, they discovered that Ideomeneus was on the verge of a massive war against a coalition

of all his neighbors. This conflict grew out of a small clash with his “barbarian” neighbors, the

Mandurians, which was the result of a miscommunication. Idomeneus’s soldiers attacked some

of the Mandurians immediately after Idomeneus himself had concluded a peace treaty with their

leader. What the Mandurians interpreted as a breach of faith prompted them to seek assistance

from all of the surrounding city-states. Instead of mediating this conflict through diplomacy,

Idomeneus seized strongholds on his border, fortified them with towers and garrisoned them with

109 Ibid., 230.

110 There is evidence that some of these pamphlets were circulated clandestinely within France. One pamphlet specifically describes how Lisola’s pamphlets were smuggled into France, The Ambitious Practices of France, 8–9. For general discussions of book smuggling and the clandestine book market see Klaits, Printed Propaganda under Louis XIV, 38; Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime, 128–132, 183–184.

45

troops.111 Thus far, Fénelon’s story reads exactly like one of Louis XIV’s wars. At the beginning

of the Nine Years War, as a “defensive measure,” Louis seized the strategic German city of

Phillippsburg, which was seen by the League of Augsburg as an act of war. During the Wars of

the Reunions, too, Louis seized strategic locations on the border between France and Germany to

enhance his defensive capabilities. On both occasions, Europe viewed Louis XIV’s actions just

as the rest of Hesperia viewed Idomeneus’s actions: as the first step in a master plan to conquer

everything. After he had described his garrisons, Ideomeneus lamented that “now it has become

very difficult to bring about a peace… [for] they [the neighboring city-states] look upon them as

citadels, built with a view to enslave them.”112

The other colonies of Hesperia, even ones that had previously been friends and allies,

were all united against Idomeneus because they believed his actions were driven by ambition. In

a line that closely echoed the international propaganda, Idomeneus explained that all of these

states “were fearful that we had a design upon their liberty. They thought that if we should

subdue these savages of the mountains [the Mandurians], we would be ambitious of extending

our conquests still farther.” Idomeneus’s former friend and ally, Nestor, confirmed this statement

at the head of the attacking coalition army. Nestor’s explanation for the allied attack on Salente

could have been taken directly from a pamphlet that advocated for opposition to Louis XIV. One

need only switch out the names. Nestor explained the situation to Mentor:

We were all desirous of peace… but Idomeneus constrained us to attack him. We could not have any safety with him. He has violated every treaty made with his neighbors. Peace with him would be no peace at all: it would only afford him means to dissolve our confederacy… He has plainly shown his ambitious designs of bringing all his neighbors under the yoke, and left them no other expedient to defend their own liberty, but that of

111 Fénelon, Telemachus, 130–133.

112 Ibid., 134.

46

overturning his new kingdom. By his bad faith we are reduced to the necessity of either accomplishing his destruction, or of seeing ourselves under the yoke of servitude.113

Idomeneus’s actions and the response of his neighbors leave no doubt that Fénelon was acutely

aware of the critical discourse that had been developed by international authors of this

propaganda. Fénelon’s depiction of Idomeneus was written from the “French” perspective and

portrayed Idomeneus as more of a bumbling idiot than the monster his enemies made him out to

be, but the sentiments and the narrative were the same. A strong, newly powerful king clashed

with a small, weak neighbor, and asserted himself in a manner that was perceived as offensive.

His neighbors viewed it as an example of insatiable ambition and assumed the powerful king had

intentions to conquer and enslave the surrounding populations. These fears prompted the

neighboring powers to unite in opposition, as happened in the War of Devolution, the Dutch War,

the Nine Years War and the War of Spanish Succession.

113 Ibid., 138–9.

47

CONCLUSION

Rethinking Intellectual Creation

In Fénelon’s story, Idomeneus did eventually learn his lesson and reformed himself

according to Mentor’s strictures. Louis XIV, however, never did. The duc de Bourgogne met

with an untimely death, as did most of the French royal family in the beginning of the eighteenth

century, and so he never had a chance to put Fénelon’s lessons into practice. Fénelon himself

was eventually exiled to his archbishopric at Cambrai. Although the ideas forwarded in

Telemachus did not have as immediate an impact on the French monarchy as they did on the

monarchy of Salente, Fénelon’s work was still incredibly influential. Montesquieu, one of the

most important early philosophes, owed a large debt to Fénelon, and even clearly references

some of Fénelon’s stories and sentiments in the Persian Letters (1721).114 Montesquieu also

criticized the French monarchy in this work, and, in the tradition of many our authors, compared

France with the “Oriental despotisms” of Persia and Turkey.115 One scholar has even analyzed

one of Montesquieu’s unpublished works to uncover his conception of universal monarchy.116

Telemachus was also extremely popular internationally. One scholar claimed that Fénelon’s tale

was the most widely read literary work in eighteenth-century France after the Bible and the

existence of so many translations and reprints suggests its popularity extended well beyond

114 Montesquieu’s fable about the Troglodytes in letters 10-14 mirrors strikingly several parts of Fénelon’s tale, including his discussion of the utopian society of Bétique and his description of the “reluctant king” found in the wise, upstanding citizen on the island of Crete. Montesquieu also argues that tolerance and liberty are better than arbitrary power in letter 118. See Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, Persian Letters, trans. Margaret Mauldon (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 14–22, 164–166; Fénelon, Telemachus, 72–76, 108–114.

115 Montesquieu, Persian Letters, see especially 47–48.

116 Paul Rahe, “The Book That Never Was: Montesquieu’s Considerations on the Romans in Historical Context,” History of Political Thought 26, no. 1 (2005): 43–89.

48

French borders.117 The influences, therefore, worked both ways. Fénelon incorporated a stock of

critiques and images developed by international authors who participated in a communal

discourse. The ideas and images he constructed from these “found items” were then read by a

wide and varied European audience and contributed to the development of further ideas in regard

to the proper role of kings and the purpose of governments.

An eclectic collection of individuals contributed to this international discussion. The

international authors under investigation here were not an isolated community devoted solely to

political propaganda. While it is true that the authors of most of these pamphlets will remain

anonymous, from the names that can be discerned one can see that their backgrounds and

intellectual milieus varied widely. Lisola was a Habsburg diplomat who only began to write

pamphlets at the end of his life. Courtilz de Sandras is better known today for his literary

writings, and particularly as a model for Alexandre Dumas’s Three Musketeers. Johann Joachim

Becher was an intellectual well known especially for his discoveries in alchemy, natural

philosophy, and economics. And Leibniz, of course, is well known not for his political writings

but for his discoveries in the realm of mathematics.118 None of these men occupied the same

sphere - intellectual, social or even geographic. And yet they all participated in, and contributed

to this international discourse opposing Louis XIV. Thus, it is no surprise that the ideas these

authors developed would be influential for an equally eclectic audience. After all, the ideal of a

117 Riley, “Introduction,” xvi.

118 Short biographical sketches can be found in Malssen, Louis XIV d’après les pamphlets, Courtilz de Sandras, 152, Jurieu, 156–7, Lisola, 159, ; Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, Becher, 148. For more detailed discussions of Lisola’s life and work see Pribram, Franz Paul Freiherr von Lisola; Longin, François de Lisola; Baumanns, Das publizistiche Werk. For a detailed discussion of the activities and interests of Johann Joachim Becher see, Pamela Smith, The Business of Alchemy: Science and Culture in the Holy Roman Empire (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For the varied intellectual pursuits of Leibniz see Antognazza, Leibniz. Benjamin Woodbridge, Gatien de Courtilz, Sieur Du Verger; Étude Sur Un Précurseur Du Roman Réaliste En France (Paris: Les Presses universitaires de France, 1925).

49

benevolent patriarch and the critique of a king’s absolute authority, which emerged in these

pamphlets, were ideas that would today be classified as products of the early Enlightenment, to

be found in works of political theory or philosophy. Fénelon’s Telemachus is one example.

The pamphlets written by this international group of authors were not were not simply

venues in which to apply ideas created by elite intellectuals in philosophical treatises as the

history of “great ideas” might imply. Instead these pamphlets performed an integral function in

the development of the critical discourse that surrounded Louis XIV and therefore the new ideal

of kingship based on this critical discourse. These authors did not just repeat ‘Enlightened’ ideas

in their works. They did certainly incorporate ideas of political theory, religion, and international

law that were already circulating. And in fact their employment of these concepts points to the

currency many of these ideas had in late seventeenth-century society. But these authors also

developed and reformulated ideas in response their own experiences of crisis, war and the threat

of conquest. Through application and articulation for a particular persuasive purpose, the authors

of these pamphlets created a particular discourse about Louis XIV that proved extremely

influential to the process of rethinking the proper execution of sovereignty.

The connection I have uncovered between international propaganda opposed to Louis

XIV and the writings of Fénelon provides a new perspective on the origins of certain ideas

associated with the early Enlightenment, and on the development of ideas in general. Fénelon’s

ideal king was not solely the independent creation of his genius. Nor was it created by a previous

generation of philosophes and passed down to Fénelon. This ideal was developed in a much

wider conversation that was stimulated by the passions and anxieties of crisis, war, persecution,

and bloodshed. An international group of authors, from a variety of different backgrounds,

employed and expanded upon each other’s constructions and concepts in order to tailor them for

50

a specific, political purpose. This problematizes the idealistic notion that there was ever a linear

descent from one idea to another or one intellectual to another. Each individual was shaped by

his or her own experiences and influences, and then reformulated that stock of material in his or

her own way. This reformulation was then published, read, and synthesized by more individuals

who incorporated, copied, repackaged, and responded in their own way. In this manner,

everybody acted the part of bricoleur as they combined visceral, daily experiences along with

everything else in order to accomplish a political or ideological goal.

51

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